


My heart's an artifice, a decoy soul (Part 1)

by orphan_account



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Age Difference, Black Romance, Blackwatch Era, Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Deadlock Gang, Extremely Dubious Consent, M/M, Psychological Torture, Rape/Non-con Elements, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-31 08:53:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18587908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Jesse Mccree, high on the horse. So sure he has it all figured out, a teenage thug in an arms dealing gang, everything in the palm of his hand.But Gabriel Reyes will make sure he never thinks that again. He's a Blackwatch agent by force, but more importantly, he belongs tohim.





	My heart's an artifice, a decoy soul (Part 1)

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a happy story. Read the tags and read and your own risk. This is exactly what it you think it is. It will be uploaded in parts so that I can remain anonymous throughout its writing. Comments are appreciated regardless.
> 
> Part 1

“Fucking Southwest,” Reyes growled, swiping the back of his fist across his damp brow. “It's hotter than the devil's asscrack.” 

“Just wait 'till we get out in the sun,” Morrison griped back. “Let's try and make this quick.”

Reyes didn't respond, just readjusted his grip on his shotgun and stared out the window.

The Deadlock sting operation had been in planning for months. Reyes wasn't looking forward to it- he hadn't liked the idea from the start. Amari had planned the operation around him being the undercover and no amount of protest could change her mind. He wouldn't lie, it was gratifying that she thought him best for the job, but he wasn't the type of man to put his life in the hands of others.

The crew Amari had originally put together was full of rookies Reyes wouldn't trust to do his laundry, much less cover him in the event of a shootout. He'd complained incessantly until she agreed to let him cherry-pick the agents involved and he'd specifically requested Moira, Genji, Lacroix, and Morrison. Personal thoughts toward each of them aside, their skills he was at least confident would keep him from getting a bullet in his head if things went south.

The engine of the dropship wheezed as it decelerated into an idle, sinking slowly to the ground. The cabin rocked as the ship touched down, and Reyes stood as soon as it stilled.

“Is everyone clear on the plan?” He didn't wait for a response. “Your objective, above all else, is to go undetected. Take out anyone you come across before they have a chance to sound the alarm; my life is on the line of you don't.”

“Are we supposed to just kill them all?” Genji asked, furrowing his brows.

“Yes. Take them all down- by any means necessary. The only one we’re required to keep alive is the leader, Elizabeth “Calamity” Ashe.”

“That's not what Captain Amari said in the briefing-”

“I don't give a damn what was said or by who!” Reyes retorted, slamming his hand into the wall next to Genji's head. “This is my mission, and I make the rules. Amari wants Deadlock gone, I'll make sure they're gone.”

Moira lifted a hand. “What are we to do if things don't go as planned?

“If they find out something's wrong, which it shouldn't, provided you all are as good as you say you are, treat it like any other mission. I'll be inside, so follow Morrison's orders. Shoot to kill, and don't stop until we have every thug and their mother taken care of. Understood?”

They all nodded. Reyes grabbed his second shotgun and handed it to Morrison.

“I'm taking one of my guns in empty so I can ask them for compatible ammo and buy you some time. Since the weapons we’re buying will be unloaded, I’ll need this back when we meet up so I have something to fight with.”

“Understood.”

“I have my comm hidden in my cap so they won't see it. You'll be able to hear everything on my end but I won’t be able to hear you while I’m in there. I'll say the code phrase we agreed on once I'm in the base's inner building- that’s your cue to move in and take care of the outside crew. Do _not_ go in before then. Once I leave with the guns, we rendezvous outside and take the main base together. Got it?”

A chorus of affirmations came in reply. Reyes opened the hatch of the dropship cabin, stepping out into the searing sunlight, and cracked his knuckles.

“Let's get this done.”

* * *

Everything had gone according to plan- for the most part

The leader of the gang, a perniciously saccharine southern woman by the name of Ashe, had come all the way to the main gate of the base to greet Reyes and escort him in. She babbled about pointless things as she took him on an infuriatingly slow stroll through the camp with her giant Omnic bodyguard in tow.

About halfway to the central building of the base she began asking him questions. Where he was from, what he needed the weapons he'd requested for, what sort of “work” he did. It was obvious she was choosing her words carefully, phrasing things clinically and watching his face from the corner of her eye. He answered confidently in conjunction with the fabricated backstory he'd created when he'd requested the weapons originally, taking on a fake Texas accent and talking to her like an old friend.

Both of them were smiling too much and too often and chuckling in obviously fake manners. It was all an elaborate game, a carefully planned chess match where the loser would end up with a bullet in their brain, and despite the countless missions he'd been on, the hairs on the back of Reyes’ neck were standing at attention.

Finally she lead him to a yellow and grey building built directly into the sandstone of the gorge. There was a large archway and multiple mineshafts leading in; it was shocking how vulnerable and ramshackle the headquarters of one of the largest black market weapon sellers in the US seemed to be.

Once he got past the walls he whistled lowly and said the code phrase, tugging at the brim of his cap to make sure the microphone picked up his words. “Mighty fine shindig ‘ya got here, miss.”

(It had been Morrison's idea to talk like a country bumpkin. He wasn't sure if it was for believability or his own amusement.)

Ashe smiled at him in a way that was distinctly hiding condescension. “That's one way to put it.”

She lead him around a corner to the nexus of the operation; wooden crates teeming with guns were stacked nearly ceiling high and the walls were lined with weapons from pulse pistols to rocket launchers. Beyond that were round tables where assorted miscreants sat, drinking, fighting, playing poker, and arm wrestling. It was a scene, nothing like the gang’s fearsome reputation

Ashe snapped her fingers at a burly man sitting nearby, motioning to a open crate on a head high stack of boxes, and he jumped to attention like a trained dog. He lifted the container and dropped it at Reyes feet before skittering back from where he'd come.

“Twenty-five top of the line models, just as requested,” Ashe announced, lifting an automatic pulse rifle from the packed box and extending it to Reyes.

He took the weapon and examined it top to bottom, squeezing it in his hands and looking down the sights. He popped open the empty magazine then shut it again, spun the gun, jammed it in a pocket of his cargo pants like a holster. (He wasn't sure what someone buying weapons off the black market typically acted like upon seeing the product.)

Apparently he got it about right, because Ashe didn't seem surprised. She just laughed, holding a hand out to take it back. Reyes handed it over and she dropped it back into the crate.

“Now, let me just-”

She was interrupted by a sudden wolf whistle from behind Reyes, followed up rapidly by a sharp slap to his ass.

Reyes recoiled in shock, spinning around and taking a step back. A dark-haired, average build young man with faded blue jeans, a pristine leather cowboy hat, and light stubble adorning an otherwise plain, round face stood where he'd just stood, a cigarette hanging from his punch-drunk grin.

“Hey now, who's this fine little piece of Tex-Mex, Ashe?”

Rage absorbed Reyes’ mind like a house fire; this man was hardly even an adult. He looked no older than eighteen, unable to grow any facial hair to speak of, and he was treating _him,_ of all people, like a sexual conquest? He bared his teeth in a grimace, shoulders squaring, and took a menacing step forward before behind stopped by the man's hand on his chest.

“Easy there, pumpkin! No need to get fired up, I was just giving you a compliment. You should learn to take 'em, it might get you places,” he said with a salacious wink and a tone dripping caramel.

Reyes's fingernails dug into his palms, and he thanked the God in heaven he didn't believe in that the rest of his team couldn't see his body-cam's video transmission.

“Jesse!” Ashe barked. “This is no time to be scoping out your next lay! Rafael is here to do business.”

(The fake name had been his own idea.)

Jesse looked past Reyes at the crate full of guns. “Damn, what's someone like you need with all this?”

“I have something of a Muertos problem,” he spat shortly, not willing to spend a second longer than necessary speaking to him.

“Huh, you'd think you two's be on the same side,” he crowed, laughing.

Ashe came up behind Reyes, speaking in a stage-whisper. “Don't pay him any mind, he's an idiot. If it weren't for his dead-eye aim, I'd never have given him the time of day.”

“Hey, you love me and you know it, Ashey.”

“And you know I told you I'd have your head if you kept calling me that. Now get _out_ of here while I finish this deal.”

“Fine,” he acquiesced, raising his palms in surrender. As he brushed by, Jesse dropped a hand down to Reyes’ groin, grabbing and squeezing hard. He walked off into the bowels of the base as Reyes's face and blood burned.

Turning back to Ashe, he cleared his throat, continuing as if nothing had happened. “You were saying?”

“...Right. Let me box this up for you and then there's just the matter of the payment.” Her voice was sweet as sugar, smile stretched across her face.

Reyes waited as she got a henchwoman to staple the crate shut, then withdrew the bricks of cash from his cargo pants. Shaken by the memory of Jesse, Reyes handed the money over without a word, trying to clear his head.

Ashe counted the money in silence before pocketing it and clapping her hands together. “Thank you for your business. I'll have B.O.B. walk you out.”

Panic surged in Reyes’ gut. He hadn't been inside for even five minutes; he needed to buy his backup more time to take out the guards outside.

“Wait!” Ashe froze, suspicion her eyes, so he took a breath to compose himself. “I wanted to see if you had bullets for a gun of mine.”

Her eyes stayed narrowed. “Alright. What's the piece?”

He unhooked his shotgun from the back of his belt, offering the butt to Ashe. She took it and examined the empty cartridge, eyebrows lifting toward her hairline.

“I've never seen anything like this one. Where'd you find it?”

His mind raced. “It was my grandpappy's. He gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday.”

“Really? It's in awful good shape for somethin’ that old.”

“He- kept it in his garage, never used it much. He lived in the middle of nowhere, no one ever tried to trespass out there.”

“He had this just for trespassers? Your pappy seems like an odd man.”

Reyes bit the inside of his cheek and stayed silent. Missions like this always burned his ass- relying on his acting skills to keep himself alive while everyone else got to be where the action was. He hated the powerlessness of relying on others instead of his own strength.

“I don't think we can help you. We deal in pulse ammunition, the only old-style weaponry around here's my Viper.”

“Viper?” he was at the end of his rope looking for ways to draw the conversation on just a bit longer.

“Viper? You don't know what a Viper is?” She sounded incredulous.

“I mean, I've heard of 'em. Ain't never laid eyes on one.”

“I thought you said you were from Texas.” Her posture was stiffening and Reyes didn't know why.

“Born and raised, what’s that got to do with this?”

“Vipers were made in Texas and Texas only. Exclusive, a Southern specialty. Every Texan I’ve ever met at least knew somebody who had one.”

Reyes swallowed. “We, ah, moved, when I was two.”

Ashe took three steps forward and Reyes took three back, raising his palms defensively. “Then why have you got a Texas accent?”

As if on cue, there was a loud thump to their right that commanded both parties’ attention. Their sudden steps had taken them back to the end of the long room, where the main archway of the building was visible.

The main archway, outside of which the guard who had before been keeping watch now lied dead on the dirt with a blood-seeping bullet hole in his forehead.

 _Fuck_.

“It’s a setup!” Ashe yelled, withdrawing a pistol from the holster on her waist and firing a shot right at Reyes.

He ducked and rolled, dashing toward the entrance with his heart in his mouth. He didn’t stop once he was outside, running for the other side of the gorge as he frantically scanned for Amélie. The bullet had obviously been from a sniper, she had to be set-up somewhere…

He tugged his hat toward his mouth, shouting as he ran. “The jig is up, prepare for combat.” He ran behind a building right outside the main base, stopping to rip the comm mic from his hat and shove it in his ear.

“Reyes? Do you read?” Morrison was saying on the other end.

“I copy. I’m outside the,” he paused, glancing at the building he was on the porch of, “bar? I think it’s a bar. Where are you?”

“O’deorain, Shimada, and I are positioned at the top of the hill by the front gate.”

“I’m on my way. Where’s Lacroix?”

“I am on top of the building across from the main base,” she answered. “Dozens of them are following you, I don’t think they have noticed me yet.”

“Take out as many as you can before they get close, Morrison and I will figure where to go from there.”

Reyes darted across the main pathway of the camp to climb the hill, running at full clip. The sound of repeated sniper shots rang out behind him, as well as the growing clamour of voices and footsteps. Just as Morrison came into view behind an outcropping of rock atop the hill, liquid fire seared through Reyes’ right leg, just below his knee. He stumbled, but kept running, searing pain jolting in his shin with each step he put weight on it

As soon as he was out of the line of sight he threw himself on the ground, sitting and extending his injured leg. Morrison and Genji watched Moira promptly squat between his legs and pull his pant leg up to examine the wound.

“Hmm,” she hummed. “This won’t do.”

“Spit it out,” Reyes barked.

“The bullet is still inside.”

“There’s a bullet? It wasn’t pulse fire?”

“No. This came from a very… _archaic_ weapon.”

_The Viper._

“Son of a bitch.”

Lacroix piped up over comms. “Be careful. There’s at least a hundred of them now.”

“A hundred? We can’t take that many,” Morrison said, peeking from behind the rocks giving them cover. “Jesus Christ, there’s a stampede. We need to move.”

“Reyes is in no condition to be walking, much less running. We need to stall them here.”

“How the hell are we supposed to stall them _here_? We’re on a hill they can walk right up!”

“If we keep talking about it we’re going to get killed either way,” Genji said, unsheathing his sword.

“Shimada!” Morrison barked futilely, failing to keep him from descending the hill and throwing a fan of shuriken. A cacophony of shots rang out and Genji lifted his sword to precisely deflect the fire.

Which worked for about half of the shots while the rest hit his chest plate, drawing a pained grunt from him.

“Goddamnit,” Morrison growled, dashing out from behind the rocks and firing at the horde.

Moira and Reyes met eyes. “I have to give them aid. Don’t move.”

“When did I stop being the leader of this mission!?” He retorted, though Moira had already joined them on the slope of the hill.

Reyes sat for a moment in silence, listening to the sounds of groans and gunfire. He clenched his fists, blood dripping down his calf.

 _Fuck it_. Gabriel Reyes was not a man to sit idly by, leg be damned.

He grabbed onto the rock wall of the gorge, pulling himself to his feet and growling at the stabbing burn of his bullet wound. He took a few tentative steps, gritting his teeth through the pain as he approached Morrison. He snatched his shotgun from his belt as well as Jack’s backup pulse pistol, striding toward the scattered crowd of gun-wielding gangsters.

“Reyes! What are you doing?”

“Finishing this job. Cover me.”

He aimed and blew the head of the nearest Deadlock member clean from its respective shoulders before putting a pulse pistol shot in another. He ducked for a bullet that would have struck his chest otherwise, then crossed his arms over each other and downed two men at once. The mob began falling like dominoes by Morrison’s pulse shots, Moira’s biotic orbs, Lacroix’s sniping, and Reyes’ own decimation. Genji let out a war cry before drawing his sword, glowing green with his dragon spirit, and slashing through a dozen enemies in a matter of seconds.

It was a disgusting scene. In less than a minute, they’d taken out nearly a hundred people. Reyes felt an adrenaline high swelling in his chest, and dropped his weapons to the dirt once the clearing was littered with corpses.

None of them had time to question the morality of what they’d done. Regardless of Overwatch policy, in that moment, it was kill or be killed.

The dreamlike moment was piercing by the sound of a motorcycle engine ripping through the air, followed by a rough cry.

“B.O.B.! Do something!”

Ashe’s omnic bodyguard came stomping from the base at full speed, arm cannons drawn.

“Scatter!” Reyes shouted, diving into the bar and out of B.O.B.’s sight in time with the rest of his team.

The motorcycle engine got louder, drowning out the sound of B.O.B.’s mechanical gunfire striking the steel building Morrison and Genji had darted into. From his vantage point in the doorway of the pub, Reyes watched Ashe drive by on a shiny motorbike, straight up the hill they’d just been on and then out of sight.

The machine gun firing ceased and after a terrifying second, B.O.B. dashed after Ashe with unnatural speed and vanished too into the distance.

Reyes stood after a moment of shock, limping into the road where Morrison, Moira, and Genji were also crawling from their hiding places. Lacroix appeared last from the back of the mineshaft she’d been camped in, grappling down to the rest of them.

“She got away…” Reyes stated, scoffing unamusedly. “All of this shit… and she got away.”

Morrison sighed and holstered his rifle. “At least we took out about the whole rest of the operation. We should scout the base to see if anyone hid in there, raid their weapon stocks while we’re at it.”

“Yeah.” Reyes didn’t have the energy to say something smart about how he was the leader of the mission anymore. He had an agonizing gunshot wound in his leg and nothing to show for it but a shameful sea of corpses that would earn him an earful from Captain Amari. His take-no-prisoners attitude was only admissible if he had something to show for it after the smoke cleared.

He limped after Morrison, Lacroix, and Genji who were already trudging toward the main base, visibly sombered by the wreckage around them. Moira and Reyes walked together, eyes on the earth.

“You really need to let me treat your leg before it gets infected, you know.”

“Not now, O’deorain.”

The deathly quiet in the valley was then broken again by a familiar Southern drawl from above them crooning,

“ _It’s high noon._ ”

Reyes whipped around just in time to see Jesse standing in one of the mineshafts leading to the main building, wielding a shiny silver revolver.

Then he fired off a shot, right at Reyes’ head.

He lunged out of the way, but not fast enough, because the bullet found its way to his right collarbone instead. As he dropped to his knees, Moira withdrew a miniature pulse pistol from her belt, shooting Jesse cleanly in the thigh. He dropped his weapon and fell forward off the ledge, tumbling to the ground with a heavy thud.

Reyes, fallen to his hands and knees with blood in his mouth, stared at her in shock. “I thought you didn’t use guns.”

“They are necessary in certain situations. Like this one.”

The other three came rushing back, worry painted across their faces. Genji drew his sword, pointing it at Jesse’s stirring form, as Morrison offered his hand to Reyes. He took it, but as he tried to pull himself up, a boiling hot surge of pain spread through his shoulder and chest. With an involuntary yell, he released the hand and violently coughed, leaving a splatter of blood on the dirt. Moira and Amélie came to both sides of him, grabbing him under his arms and lifting him to a standing position.

As he braced himself on their shoulders, Moira tutted. “The bullet seems to have shattered your clavicle. It likely grazed your lung as well. You need medical attention immediately.”

“One thing first,” he said through a mouthful of blood. He limped away from Moira and Amélie to where Jesse had rolled over onto his back, clutching his thigh and watching Genji with angry, unfocused eyes. As Reyes approached, the grimace on his face deepened and he growled lowly in his throat.

“Killing him as well, I assume?” Genji asked.

Reyes leaned over and spat the blood in his mouth on Jesse’s face.

“No, I want him alive. Death would be a mercy he doesn’t deserve.”

With that, he punched him in the face and knocked his world into unconsciousness.


End file.
